A protester in Istanbul this month displays an image of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the city’s mayor whose arrest in March prompted the biggest demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade © Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images

On July 5, Turkish police detained the mayors of Adana, Adiyaman and Antalya on corruption charges, which they deny. They were subsequently arrested. On July 4, the former mayor of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city, and the local head of the opposition Republican People’s party (CHP) were arrested too. 

The CHP carried the municipal elections in March 2024. With nearly 38 per cent of the votes, the party — which was founded by Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — became the country’s leading party in terms of vote share for the first time since 1977. Of Turkey’s 81 provinces, the CHP won 35. It wrested 10 provinces from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative Justice and 

Development party (AKP). According to the polls, the CHP would carry a national election if it were held today. 

Erdoğan’s response has been to launch an unprecedented crackdown. So far, 17 CHP mayors have been arrested. The arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, in March sparked the biggest demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade — and a market downturn. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 20 months in prison on charges of insulting a prosecutor. 

İmamoğlu called the latest crackdown “a coup against democracy”. Erdoğan 

defended it, alleging that the “CHP is mired in corruption”. He told the CHP to abstain from protests and disingenuously called on it to wait for the verdicts of the “independent judiciary”. 

It’s now clear that Erdoğan is implementing a blueprint to demoralise and disable the CHP. But it’s equally clear that the CHP has no intention of yielding. 

On July 6, CHP leader Özgür Özel exhorted Erdoğan to “come to his senses”, 

vowing to mobilise mass protests on the scale of Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests in 2011. On July 7, the public prosecutor of Ankara launched an investigation into Özel — whose parliamentary immunity stands to be revoked — on accusations of “inciting crime”, “threatening public officials” and “insulting the president”. 

Erdoğan can deploy the might of the state against opponents. He’s also 

emboldened by the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) that began disarming on July 11. Yet his autocratic model is unsustainable. 

The president hopes to forge an alliance with the Kurds, and secure re-election. But the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy and Equality (DEM) party recognises that the crackdown on the CHP undermines the prospects of reconciliation and has denounced it. 

Erdoğan enjoyed widespread popular legitimacy when he had secularist military officers arrested in purges between 2008 and 2014 — as well as when followers of the cleric Fethullah Gülen were purged after a 2016 coup attempt and when he targeted the Kurdish political movement. Today, the majority, including a 

significant proportion of Erdoğan’s own base, disapproves of the arrests, and views the allegations of corruption as politically motivated fabrication. 

Erdoğan pretends that his electoral majority gives him licence to trample on 

democratic and civil liberties. During the Gezi protests against public land seizures in 2013, he said that “democracy is the ballot box, period”. Now, the ballot box itself is ignored. For the first time, that has put Erdoğan on a collision course with a broad majority that won’t passively acquiesce. 

Ominously, Turkish history is repeating itself. In the late 1950s another 

democratically elected conservative Turkish leader, who also pretended to embody popular will, tried to disable the CHP. After his party lost significant ground to the CHP in elections, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes — who is, not coincidentally, Erdoğan’s political hero — responded by jailing journalists and bringing criminal charges against CHP members of parliament. 

The attempt to criminalise the opposition led to protests, and the oppression that the Menderes government unleashed threw Turkey into a deep crisis. In 1960, that government was ousted in a coup by military officers acting outside the chain of command. By abolishing democracy, Erdoğan is also inviting a chaotic end to his rule. 

Halil Karaveli is a senior fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan.